Solomon James said, with tears in his eyes “I don’t know who’s the first to put the chains on her, but I’m glad to know I was the last to take them off.”
Mary Helen Blanchard, an educator with over 30 years teaching and writing experience, would often take her 3 children and classroom students to visit the Louisiana Purchase Gardens and Zoo in Monroe, Louisiana. There they would visit the zoo’s only elephant, a lonely elder named Shirley, with a crooked leg and torn ear. Then one day she was gone. Old and ill, the zoo sent her to a little known Elephant Sanctuary just starting in Hohenwald, Tennessee. She would be the fourth in their rescue herd.
The earliest known proboscidean has been found in southern Algeria. It is the fossilized skull of a swamp -living animal from the early Miocene epoch, some fifty-four million years ago. The beast apparently stood less than three feet tall, but the anatomy of its head reveals the characteristics of a once present prehensile trunk, hallmark of all proboscideans. Biologists love to speculate on the origin of the prehensile trunk. Under what circumstances might such a structure be advantageous? The ecological setting of some later proboscidean finds indicates they were aquatic or semiaquatic creatures, like the Algerian species. Perhaps this is a vital clue. Perhaps, speculation runs, natural selection favored the evolution of an organ that could harvest vegetation while the animal was in shallow water. A rudimentary trunk, which is formed from the lips, palate, and nostrils, could do that job. True or not, the trunk became an important organ for proboscideans, and its evolution was eventually accompanied by the evolution of…
